A Fortunate Life (10 page)

Many ‘ten-pound Poms’ found it too difficult in Australia and quickly returned to Britain. But not my parents. After a very tough beginning in a transit camp, my father took up a ‘temporary’ teaching post in the Victorian town of Castlemaine (they chose the town because it had the same name as a town in southern Ireland). He became, in time, a much-loved and respected teacher at the local high school. On a recent visit there to see my sister I was frequently stopped in the street by his grown-up pupils, telling me how much he had changed their lives, as two of my teachers had changed mine. My mother, also much-loved, worked as a nurse in the local hospital. Australia and Castlemaine were very kind to my parents and my brothers and sisters. Of the five of my siblings who went there with my parents, one has died, one was killed in a road accident, one, Mark, has returned to England and is a solicitor in Bristol. But the remaining two, my brother Tim and my sister Alisoun, are proud Australians and have established families firmly planted in that country’s welcoming soil.

Now, however, I was on my own – apart from Jane that is. But our relationship was still in its early stages.

The next phase of our training took my colleagues and I to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth to learn navigation and seamanship. This culminated in a three-month training voyage with the Dartmouth training squadron, consisting of three frigates, HMSs
Venus
,
Vigilant
and
Urchin
. We visited Gibraltar, Tenerife and the Cape Verde Islands before making a very rough Atlantic crossing to the West Indies, where we spent six weeks cruising the islands and calling at the major ports. We learned the routines of shipboard life, watch-keeping, gunnery, engineering, damage-control, first aid, and how to fight the ship on active service. We also had a very good time, climbing Teide (the mountain on Tenerife), visiting the strip joints in La Linea, close to Gibraltar (grubby, sweaty and sordid and enough to put me off such things for life),
drinking too much rum in Barbados, and then learning the technique of negotiating the gangway on our return, under the alert eye of the Officer of the Watch, without letting it show too much.

During these three months Jane and I kept up a regular and passionate correspondence as our relationship deepened. I spent that summer holiday with her and her family and then, in late August, sailed to Norway to take part in a joint-services expedition based in the town of Glomfjord, well north of the Arctic Circle and sheltering under the largest glacier in Europe. The town was also famous for being one of the targets of the daring SOE raids (immortalised in the film
The
Heroes of Telemark
) on Norwegian power stations during the war, in order to prevent the German production of heavy water, a key ingredient for the development of a nuclear weapon.
*

Our task, however, was far less dangerous. We were to map some of the high mountains above the fjord and, in the process, learn about cartography. We lived at the time almost totally on dried rations, which share one quality of almost all service field rations, only more so: they look very much the same when they come out as they did when they went in. This is especially true of dried apple rings, which formed a major part of our diet and which, I observed, could pass through the entire intestinal tract of healthy young men without any detectable change to either their composition or their shape.

I know this because in Glomfjord I helped to construct the finest latrine upon which I have ever sat. It happened like this.

One of my fellow expeditioneers was a young Royal Engineer officer who had just finished his demolition course. He was given the job of building the camp latrine, and I was apprenticed as his assistant. After an extensive reconnaissance we finally settled on a small ravine, perhaps thirty feet wide and twenty deep, which formed a cleft in the mountain not too far from our base camp. Along the side of the ravine was a small stand of fir trees. My Royal Engineer friend selected two
stout ones growing close together and, using expertly placed plastic explosive, dropped them neatly across the ravine. A little work with levers was all that was then required to manoeuvre them so that they lay parallel to each other and about six feet apart. We secured them firmly to each bank with rope and spikes driven into the ground and then used them as the basis for a most impressive structure which had a narrow walkway giving access to a most magnificent eight-holer. We were miles from anywhere and some two thousand feet above the fjord, so there was no need for screens to hide us from prying eyes. I have known few more congenial experiences in my life than sitting every morning, in the company of my fellows, over a twenty-foot-deep latrine, with the mountains around us, looking down on the returning trawlers of the local fishing fleet dotting the fjord below and listening to the distinctive ‘pot, pot, pot’ sound of their big, single-cylinder diesel engines wafting up to us from the calm waters below.

My first act when I got back from our Norwegian adventure was to go and see Jane, who had now got a job in London. I turned up unannounced at her bedsit on the fourth floor of 13 Philbeach Gardens, Earls Court. I had fixed nowhere to sleep that night and hoped to be able to stay with her. But I reckoned without her dragon of a landlady, Miss Griffith-Jones, who instructed me in tones not to be disobeyed that ‘All visitors are to be out by eleven o’clock’. So, after a scratch meal of baked beans from her fridge (all she had at the time), I left to take pot luck on the streets of London. I called in at a nearby mobile tea and buttie stand, where I met a very pleasant man of around 60, who asked if I had anywhere to stay? I said I didn’t and he offered to give me a bed for the night. We walked back to his flat nearby where we sat and talked over glasses of whisky. I found him engaging, interesting and utterly charming. He introduced himself as very well-known contributor to a popular tabloid newspaper. After about two hours conversation and several more whiskies he told me that he was homosexual, was I? I said I wasn’t, and the conversation then continued as though the subject had never been raised, until the early hours of the morning. I remember him as one of the most urbane, interesting and civilised people I have ever met.
*

Next on our training agenda was the much feared Commando course, which we began in late September 1960. Newly joined Royal Marines wear the Corps’s distinctive blue beret with a red patch on the front, on which is mounted the Globe and Laurel which is our insignia. The green beret of the Commandos has to be earned on a six-week course designed to test the limits of physical endurance. The centrepiece of the course is a series of forced, or ‘speed’, marches which must be accomplished at a pace of a mile in ten minutes, carrying full kit and rifle. These speed marches escalate from the ‘five-miler’ to the final march in full kit across thirty miles of open Dartmoor, which we Officers had to complete in seven hours and the Marines in eight. In addition there were exercises to test mental endurance when tired, negotiating an assault course while carrying a ‘wounded’ comrade over obstacles, and high rope and net work in the upper branches of a local wood. It was very tough going, but we all got through it and received our much-coveted green berets on 28 October 1960.

This brought us to the next phase of our training, in which we were posted as junior Troop officers to an active service Commando for a year. To my delight I was posted that autumn, along with my two colleagues Tim Courtenay and Rupert van der Horst, to 42 Commando Royal Marines, then serving in Singapore.

Before the start of our posting, we were given a month’s leave, which I spent in part with Jane’s family and in part, accompanied by Jane, with my Dorset aunt, who was now, after my father’s departure, the senior member of the Ashdown family in Britain. My aunt, though at first sight soft, feminine and feline, was in reality something of a tartar, with a very strong will and decidedly settled views. She could be very intimidating when roused or displeased. But she immediately took to Jane (whom she called ‘little Jane’, despite being at least three inches the shorter of the two). It was during this visit, on a hilltop overlooking her house in Upwey, on a fine spring morning in May, that I proposed to Jane. I was nineteen at the time, and Jane, who is a few months older than me, was just a month short of twenty. We agreed to get married as soon as my training was over in eighteen months. At this time the services strongly discouraged officers from getting married before they were twenty-five. So we would have to ask their Lordships of the Admiralty for permission to marry, and even then would receive none of the allowances, accommodation or travel support given to married couples until I was twenty-five. Since neither
of us had any money at all, life was going to be very tough for us – but, of course, we thought little of that in the excitement and joy of the moment. I think that my aunt was a little shocked, though, when we came back that day and told her the news.

But we had strong support from my parents in Australia (even though they had never met Jane) and from Jane’s parents – and from one other invaluable source. One of the senior officers at ITCRM at the time was a remarkable man who was admired, respected and loved by all of us as a most just person and an outstanding soldier. He had had a glittering war record in the Commandos. He had also taken to Jane and, I think, realised that, because of my upbringing and the recent loss of my parents, I had seen more of life than most nineteen-year-olds. He supported us and it was, I am sure, because of him that we did eventually (but a year later) get permission from the Admiralty to marry. Some years later he resigned from the Royal Marines over an issue related to homosexuality in the armed forces – a tragedy for him and a terrible loss to all he commanded. Many years later, when, as an MP, I was amongst the first to campaign to have the law changed to allow homosexuals to serve in the armed services, I was doing something which I not only knew to be right but which also enabled me to repay a small debt to this outstanding man.

A month later on 15 November 1960, Jane and I said rather tearful goodbyes in the Bunch of Grapes pub on the Kings Road, Chelsea, and I left to take up my new posting in Singapore.